Belated Interactive Fiction Post

So evidently I posted the article I was supposed to write about last week instead of writing about the IF article. So I know this isn’t relevant to the topic of Community but after re-reading the IF section after our discussion I had some thoughts.

The parser as a God figure struck me as an interesting parallel, especially when Eve discusses how liberal a parser may interept the PC’s actions and it made me think of Judaism. Precisely I mean that a conservative parser, like a conservative/Orthodox conception of God requires that everything be done correctly in the correct order piece by piece. God isn’t going to generously assume that you meant to do right thing, you have to actually do it. On the other hand more liberal conceptions of God think that the little nitty-gritty of the Law aren’t terribly important and so instead of, in IF parlance typing “keep kosher” followed by “rest on Shabbos” and then “Love God” would be the more conservative, Orthodox way while just typing “Love God” and the parser inserting the others would be the more liberal interpretation.

And then the question of what IF has to say about free will is terribly interesting. I feel like it does create a sort of Western-theist view of free will in the sense that yes, you have it, you are allowed to try and do whatever you want. What makes it Western-theist though is that there is pretty much only ONE way to get it right, and to do that you have to negotiate the right path with the parser(God) until you reach the end. Ending up muddled, confused, and lost without any idea as where to go next could be compared to a crisis of faith and just quitting is like giving up on religion and you never get to see the glorious end. It’s an idea.

Also, there was a fire-alarm when I was writing the Reading-post for Monday so I’ll quickly finish that thought.

Communitas reminds me of internet communities. The author was saying that Communitas is needed for healthy societies and I thought that maybe when organized religions allow the more chaotic flow of internet chatrooms or discussion boards to enter more thoroughly into their structure that maybe it will revitalize some really sagging, heavily hierarchical religions like Catholicism.

Reading Assignment For Today

The first ritual readings was a classic one about sacred vs. profane. I’ve heard a lot about the theory so it was interesting to actually get to read it. What really struck me was the line about how people fear mixing sacred with profane because they feel the profane will “infect” the sacred. That fear is a strong component of many peoples’ fear of using technology in religion I feel. That somehow by portraying Jesus on bytes or some of these other controversies that somehow the profanity of profane objects will leech over and foul the sacred.

At the same time though, the sacred/profane divide seems a little artificial as there are things which cross that divide quite regularly. Wine is a great example example, for pagans or Christians it could both be sacred libation or delicious dinner complement. So then couldn’t the same happen for technology?

The other reading showed the concept of communitas. All I could think as the author was describing communitas is how much it sounded like an internet forum or things of this kind. Then thinking about the idea that communitas is needed for social, fire alarm.

Shamanism Enjoys Revival in Techno-Savvy South Korea

This article is about the sudden boom in popularity of Korean folk religion in modern day South Korea. One particularly amazing statistic they mention is that there is around one shaman for every 160 people in South Korea. The modern boom seems to have come because after years of being suppressed by Christian missionaries and millitary governments, the shamans are finally accepted by the establishment. This combined with the very materialistic, the here-and-now mindset of South Korea has led to shamans becoming a massively important part of many Koreans’ lives.

This relates to community, especially the internet community, because the shamans seem very much part of the internet mold of religion. First there is no singular scripture and everyone has their own gods they placate or spirtual specialities. This is like a religious version of the splintering of larger groups into tiny sub-sub-cultures that the internet has produced. Despite their ancient practices such as sacrifice they were some of the first religious groups to get on the internet and offer bookings and fortunes online. What this has to say about religion, technology, and community is that more fractured, fluid, and less dogmatic religions may have a surge in popularity as they are more suited to the virtual environment.

“Cybertheater, Postmodernism and Virtual Reality: An Interview with Toni Dove and Michael Mackenzie.”

First of all this piece attempted to explain what the performance piece that Toni Dove worked on in detail yet I cannot visualize it all. It involved linked monitors connected by fiberoptics that were displaying…different images of things that the performers were interacting with in someway. Honestly the description is one of the most baffling parts of the article and I still can’t understand quite what the performance actually looked like.

One interesting theory the interviewees put forth is that technology collapses in the sense that after a breakthrough of sorts that multiple ways of doing the same thing exist for a while before collapsing back into a single unified format. That in itself isn’t very revolutionary but they go on to say that artists and others have a window of opportunity in between the burst and the collapse to really experiment with a breadth of things before the technology unifies and mainstream culture is that much harder to crack into.

When the conversation turns to VR the interviewees conjecture that all this bro-ha-ha around VR, in 1995, is partially due to William Gibson’s very fantastic vision of the future where VR was so realistic people could become junkies and eschew reality for VR. Of course William Gibson also thought data was going to be stored on crystals in the future so his predictions are faulty at best.  It is interesting to see just how excited about VR helmets and everything people were ten years ago and how wrong they were that it was going to really take off.

They also agree that people are beginning to view stories and narratives in a non-linear way. Helped in part by things like hypertext a narrative can be linear, symbolic, and imaginary all at the same time. They mention a very avant-garde performance a friend put on as an example where “two people on a Venetian table-top, which is also a Chopinesque-piano going around in circles, and a woman talking about a drug experience at the same time as she is a 19th-century ballet dancer at the same time as there is a relationship between her and someone else, which is a remembrance of another relationship. There’s a certain kind of density, like the way in which the convergence and divergence of different elements happens in novels.” And with technology stories like this are more possible as different mediums can convey different layers of the story.

The rest of the article concerns neither virtual reality, religion, or technology in significant way and just veers off into more art-theory talk.

Essentially I had very little idea what they were talking about the entire time. I could decipher a few interesting points on narrativity that seem relevant to our discussion of religion and virtual reality such as the potential for things like The Bible to be digitized and then have multiple layers of meaning thrown at the consumer simultaneously instead of piece by piece which it is now.

Reading Response Numero Three, I believe

I will preface this response by saying I still haven’t recieved my First Person book. I now have a sneaking suspicion I forgot to order it, which would be quite negligent of me. But alas I just don’t have a copy to read, but I did finally get my Reader for Ritual Studies.

This reading didn’t really bring up a point so much as rail against some views held by a wide number of people. In fact that view that Greek theater arose from Dionysian rituals and that tragoidia comes from “goat song” and all the things he complained about are things I learned in Intro to Theater. So evidently this debate is alive today, or no one’s telling the drama professors. The key component the author emphasized is that rituals are about community, there is a social structure in place that helps empower to the ritual. Just because a play like King Lear enacts symbol-laden actions in a fashion which might superficially resemble a ritual, that doesn’t mean it IS a ritual without the communal backing.

How this relates to our discussion might be how a lot of virtual reality is actually focused on community.  Things like message boards, online gaming, and play in virtual worlds involves a lot of community. Clubs, “clans”, virtual churches, all of these communities might according to the author allow many things occurring in virtual reality to move to that realm of ritual in ways a play or I assume by extension a film never could.

Public Can Check Halal Status Via SMS To Jakim – Post

This news article demonstrates a real practical application of technology to real-life problems that religious folks face. In this case it is the ever present question to Muslims of if a certain food product is halal or not. From a Jewish background I can understand that confusion because a lot of foods claim to kosher by putting a k or a p on the product but since letters cannot be trademarked, these products are not actually investigated by rabbis. Some products that are widely understood to not be kosher like Jello still try to pass themselves off as kosher, adding to confusion.

So in Malaysia they came up with a brilliant idea of having a central government agency investigate all food products in the country and check if they are halal. Then by simply texting the barcode of the product to a certain number, one can get an answer if that food is halal or not. This is being combined with a central agency standardizing halal food labels and conducting audits.

Something like this is a great example of how technology can help believers in their everyday lives. Previously one would have to check with an imam or other trusted source to see what was halal and what was not and then remember or write them down and then shop for them. Now using the cellphone networks and the generally convenient nature of cellphones, answers to persistent but important questions are at believers fingertips.

Reading Response Numbero Dos

I still have not received the Ritual Readings book or the First Person one, meaning I only have the Bogost to read. It was interesting to see him go from a seemingly pretty objective scholarly type in his earlier chapters to having a clear bias in this one. Most of the chapter seemed to be not about procedural rhetoric, video games, or anything of the sort at all but instead a critique of consumerism, capitalism, jobs, schools, and anything else he labels “institutions”. This personally threw me off and served as a bit of a barrier for my engagement the text.

What I could draw forth was that it seems impossible for video games to EDUCATE people, in that it teaches them to sort of critically approach problems because they all have limitations and biases built in due to their coded nature. I counter that notion with the video game Hitman: Blood Money. Essentially every level is a mission where you are just loosely given the task “Kill this person” and the rest is utterly open. There are of course hard-coded limitations due to constraints such as having to stay in a certain area and the limited AI and the lack of any true social interraction. Despite all of this I believe the game still proceduraly teaches problem solving/critical thinking, which is an important component of his definition of education. There is always an obvious way to do every mission which is shoot and run, but exploration of the environment leads to a plethora of things, places, and people to interact with in the eventual goal of the assassination.

Which leads me to his next topic which was about how video games relate to morality and procedural rhetoric’s place in that. I believe a good way of looking at how video games can teach skills and knowledge sets procedurally and yet don’t teach “killer instinct” or anything like that when violent games are played is what I outlined above. When I play a violent game such as Hitman, my core thought process is less about killing and more about problem solving. I know that I have a goal and I have to explore the environment, see how things interact which each other, and eventually discover an efficient way to accomplish my goal. I am not procedurally learning how to assassinate someone for money or anything of the sort, it’s more of a puzzle or thought game that has the trappings of being assassin because that is visually engaging set-dressing.